It has been more than a decade since we have seen one of the large European telecommunications companies invest substantially at the fiber level in the USA. But the drought is over, as Teliasonera International Carrier (TSIC) announced today a significant fiber-based expansion.
Alone among its peers TSIC kept its US fiber network intact through the telecom nuclear winter that followed the boom and bust of the tech bubble a decade ago. It was originally built off dark fiber on the WilTel backbone, and last year they upgraded it to 100G with Infinera’s DTN-X superchannels.
Now they’ve gone beyond that original intercity fiber and are lighting another 11,500 fiber miles of additional dark fiber, extending their reach to 44 US markets and into 50 US data centers. They now have a fiber route between Chicago and Atlanta, as well fiber to Miami from broth Atlanta and Ashburn up in Northern Virginia. New markets along the way that they now serve include Indianapolis, Nashville, Tampa, Boca Raton, Jacksonville, Reston, and Manassas.
The new routes will primarily give TSIC better reach, latency, and diversity nationwide for their global IP backbone, although they are also seeing more demand at the transport/Ethernet layers. Better connectivity to the Florida landing stations serving cables to Central and South America was also clearly a big part of this. The expansion brings their fiber into data centers operated by 365main, Cologix, CoreSite, Equinix, and EvoSwitch.
Given Teliasonera’s growing interest in the US market, I wonder if it’s possible that they might look at M&A here as well to further boost their position. The current balance between US and European valuations probably makes that more difficult, but perhaps they might be a viable suitor for a player like Cogent at some point.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones
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Whose fiber is this?
My guess would be Level3, or a combo of them and Zayo. Zayo doesn’t have a Nashville to the north route, if you look at their map its actually a decent gap of theirs, so obviously that route isn’t theirs.
From what I know this is Centurylink fibers. I believe Centurylink have bought fibers from TeliaSonera in Europe as a counter purchase
I saw the routes on their map too, but I didn’t know they were much of a dark player? Never known them to play on price either, but like you suggest maybe there was some quid pro quo going on.
http://www.centurylink.com/business/asset/network-map/fiber-network-nm090928.pdf
I agree, CenturyLink would make more sense than Level 3, which Teliasonera International Carrier competes with more directly. And the routes do seem to match up. Now, I wonder what CenturyLink might be planning to do with some European fiber if indeed there was such a side to this deal…